ITIDA´s role in supporting radio science R&D in Egypt

Summary form only given. Radio science is one of the engineering sciences that witnessed unparalleled progress over the past decades, due to its incorporation in a broad spectrum of technologies and applications. Electronics, photonics, wireless communications, signal processing, and microwaves are among the disciplines that fall under the umbrella of radio science and each, in its own right, is pushing the technological frontiers to new borders at breath-taking rates. The Information Technology/Academic Collaboration (ITAC) Program, launched by the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) in Egypt in late 2006, stands out as the oldest and probably the only Egyptian funding program that fosters collaborative research between academia and industry with the goal of developing innovative products that exploit the capabilities in universities to put Egyptian industry in a leading position, both locally and internationally. The ITAC Program has funded more than 70 projects in different disciplines, dominated by projects in electronics, signal processing, and wireless communications. In this talk, the framework of the ITAC Program, the research areas, and statistics of the distribution of funded projects over the research areas and the institutions are presented. Success stories of some concluded projects are demonstrated, with emphasis on projects pertaining to radio sciences.